Note that if you experience some problem with Funtoo Linux, during installation or otherwise, the proper course of action is to not add a work-around to our documentation, but to open a bug on our bug tracker. This is important because the problem you experienced may be a legitimate bug and the solution may be to fix the bug rather than add a work-around to our documentation. We may end up fixing a bug, making a documentation fix, or possibly both.

Basics

Here is a list of basic wiki information that you will need to know to get started:

Whether creating a new page or editing an existing page by clicking "Edit", you will be presented with Web-based text editor that allows you to modify the wikitext of the page. The wikitext is rendered to produce the document you see when you view the page normally.

Another fun thing you can do is click on your name under the "Account" menu once you have logged in. This will bring you to your "User" page. Then click "Create with Form" unde the "Actions" menu and enter your geographic and other information. This will allow you to be displayed on our Usermap and will also allow your full name to be displayed on Ebuild pages for which you are an author. It's generally a good idea to do this.

Tip

The following sections document how to use wikitext and Funtoo templates on the Funtoo wiki.

Paragraphs

To create a new paragraph, insert a blank line between two lines of text. If a blank line doesn't exist between two lines of wikitext, they will be combined into a single flowing paragraph.

If you leave leading whitespace at the beginning of a line, MediaWiki will render it as pre-formatted text. Beware of this. Here's an example:

foobar

This can rear its ugly head when specifying template parameters, so you will get this:

Note

ugh!

...instead of this:

Note

This looks much better!

Page and Section Capitalization

In general, capitalize all words in page names and section heading except:

Articles: a, an, the

Coordinating Conjunctions: and, but, or, for, nor, etc.

Prepositions (fewer than five letters): on, at, to, from, by, etc.

Document Hierarchy

Use section headings to create a document hierarchy for your page. These will define the table of contents that appears at the top of the wiki page. Create chapters, sections and sub-sections as follows:

By default, Table of Contents is disabled on the Funtoo wiki. If you would like to enable the TOC, you can place a __TOC__ on a blank line where you'd like the Table of Contents to appear, or place __FORCETOC__ on a blank line anywhere in the wikitext to force the TOC to appear at the top of the page.

In general, when creating new documents, it's best to use level-3 (three "="'s) Section Titles to break up content. Level-2 Section Titles are best used for major sections of larger documents. Use them infrequently. Level-1 Section Titles generally do not need to be used.

Links

Internal links to other wiki pages can be specified as [[pagename]]. To specify an alternate name for the link, use [[pagename|my link name]].

For external links, use [http://funtoo.org my link] to specify a URL. If you want the URL to appear in the wikitext, you can specify it without brackets: http://forums.funtoo.org.

Lists

MediaWiki supports a number of list formats:

Unordered List

Unordered Item 2

Unordered sub-item

Ordered List

Ordered Item 2

Ordered sub-item

Term

This is called a "definition list". It is used when defining various terms.

If you need to quote a portion of text from another site, use <blockquote> as follows:

Wikipedia (ˌwɪkɨˈpiːdiə/ or wɪkiˈpiːdiə/ wik-i-pee-dee-ə) is a collaboratively edited, multilingual, free-access, free content Internet encyclopedia that is supported and hosted by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Volunteers worldwide collaboratively write Wikipedia's 30 million articles in 287 languages, including over 4.5 million in the English Wikipedia. Anyone who can access the site can edit almost any of its articles, which on the Internet comprise[4] the largest and most popular general reference work.[5][6][7][8][9] In February 2014, The New York Times reported that Wikipedia is ranked fifth globally among all websites stating, "With 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors a month..., Wikipedia trails just Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft and Google, the largest with 1.2 billion unique visitors."[10]

Literal Text and HTML Symbols

Here is wikitext for the section above, which I am displaying by placing the literal wikitext between a <pre> and </pre> tag. If you want to disable wikitext processing for an inline span of text, use <nowiki> and </nowiki>. If you want to print out a tag literally, use &#60; and &#62; (In the wikitext, I used &amp;#60; and &amp;#62 to display these!)

* Unordered List
* Unordered Item 2
** Unordered sub-item
# Ordered List
# Ordered Item 2
## Ordered sub-item
;Term: This is called a "definition list". It is used when defining various terms.
If you need to quote a portion of text from another site, use <tt><blockquote></tt> as follows:
<blockquote>
Wikipedia (ˌwɪkɨˈpiːdiə/ or wɪkiˈpiːdiə/ wik-i-pee-dee-ə) is a collaboratively edited, multilingual, free-access,
free content Internet encyclopedia that is supported and hosted by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Volunteers
worldwide collaboratively write Wikipedia's 30 million articles in 287 languages, including over 4.5 million in the
English Wikipedia. Anyone who can access the site can edit almost any of its articles, which on the Internet
comprise[4] the largest and most popular general reference work.[5][6][7][8][9] In February 2014, The New York
Times reported that Wikipedia is ranked fifth globally among all websites stating, "With 18 billion page views
and nearly 500 million unique visitors a month..., Wikipedia trails just Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft and Google,
the largest with 1.2 billion unique visitors."[10]
</blockquote>

Linking to Packages

To link to a package page, use the Package template:

{{Package|sys-apps/portage}}

This template will create a link to the official wiki page for sys-apps/portage, and render using the official "English" page name, as follows:

The parameters name (filename), lang (language for syntax highlighting) and desc (Description, appearing as a caption) are optional. For a list of supported languages, see this list.

Important

If you need to display the pipe ("|") character within the body of a file template, replace each "|" with {{!}} -- otherwise your file contents will not display properly. This is necessary because {{file}} is a template and the "|" character is used as a delimiter for arguments to the template.

Displaying Text File Contents

For displaying the contents of non-programming language text files (like config files), you have two options. You can enclose your lines within <pre> tags, or use the new file template. The file template is used like so:

Note that we use a # prompt for root and a $ prompt to denote a non-root user.

Important

The ##i## text tags the rest of the line as being user input ("i" is for "input"). It is then highlighted in a noticeable color so it stands out from text that is not typed in by the user.

If you need to end highlighting of user input prior to the end of a line, use ##!i## to mark the end of the highlighted area.

The following special character sequences are also available:

##g## - Green

##y## - Yellow

##bl## - Blue

##r## - Red

##b## - Bold

Please use the above coloring options sparingly. It is sometimes nice to use them to get wiki console output to match the colors that are displayed on a Linux console. Also note that for every color above, there is a matching ##!(colorcode)## option to turn color off prior to end of line.

Discussion Pages

In MediaWiki, every "regular" wiki page has a corresponding "Talk" or "Discussion" page which has a page name prefixed by "Talk:" -- you can get to this page by going to the "Action" menu, and then choosing the "Discussion" menu item. These talk pages are typically used to discuss the edits that are going on in the "main" wiki page. The problem with talk pages is that they are kind of a pain to use. However, we have a way to fix that. If you want to enable a DISQUS-based mini-forum on a talk page, insert the following wikitext on the Talk page:

{{DISQUS}}

...and presto! You will now have DISQUS-powered mini-forums to discuss whatever you want about your wiki page.

Marking Pages as Needing Updates

If you find outdated wiki content, but you don't have the time or ability to update it, add one of the following templates to the wikitext of the page. This will add the page to the Needs Updates Category so we can identify pages that need updating:

Inline Code

To emphasize commands, and other technical jargon when they appear inline in a paragraph, use the {{c}} template. When referencing files, use the {{f}} template.

The {{f|/etc/fstab}} file is an important one. Another important file is {{f|/boot/grub/grub.cfg}}. The {{c|emerge}} command is really nifty.

This example produces the following output:

The /etc/fstab file is an important one. Another important file is /boot/grub/grub.cfg. The emerge command is really nifty.

Important

The <tt> tag has been deprecated for the purpose of tagging inline code, to conform with HTML5, and the previous use of the <code> tag is discouraged. It is more maintainable to use the {{c}} template.

Slideshow

Any page has the capability of displaying a slideshow. Adding a slideshow to a page involves three steps:

Upload Images

Define Slides

Add Slideshow to page

Upload Images

To upload images, head to Special:Upload and upload a file. It is highly recommended to upload JPEG format images in high resolution -- MediaWiki will handle scaling JPEG automatically, saving bandwidth, but does not do this for PNG. Make sure that all images you upload have the same dimensions. When you upload, make note of the Destination Filename field -- this is the name that the upload will use when you reference it in your slide. It is recommended that you choose a simple descriptive name ending in ".jpg" for the Destination Filename.

Define Slides

Once images have been uploaded, you must define slides. To define slides on a page, you enter special semantic information about the slide on the page that it will be displayed, in the following format:

slideIndex must be 0 for the first slide, 1 for the second slide, etc. Numbers must be unique and incrementing from zero, and not doing this will result in slideshow display errors (but can be easily fixed by correcting the wikitext.)

slideCaption= can contain wikitext, such as headings and links. The best way to enter slideCaption is as above -- type a literal slideCaption=, followed by enter, then specify your wikitext, and terminate the caption by a single pipe character on the following line. Pipe characters are used to separate arguments from each other.

Specify your image name in the slideImage field. Your slideImage will have a name of File:myname.jpg, where myname.jpg is the Destination Filename you used when uploading the image.

An optional parameter called slideLink= can be provided to allow the image to be clickable and link to another wiki page. If it is omitted, then the image will not be clickable.

Add Slideshow to Page

Once the slides have been added to the page, you can add the following text to your page at the point you'd like the slideshow to appear:

{{Slideshow}}

YouTube Videos (Screencasts, etc.)

Screencasting is an easy method to explain complex tasks. Take for instance youtu.be/5KDei5mBfSg and chop off the id and insert it into the following syntax to produce a video example.

{{#widget:YouTube16x9|id=5KDei5mBfSg}}

Tip

The sample video above explains how to create your own screencasts under Funtoo Linux.

Most YouTube videos are in 16x9 format and should use the YouTube16x9 widget. There is also a YouTube4x3 widget for videos with a 4x3 aspect ratio.